[Discussion] literature unifiers? whom?

[Paksoy, Hb]

>From the issue dated November 29, 2002  	

 <<...OLE_Obj...>> 	OBSERVER The Wild East: Humanists' Great Opportunity
in China By LINDSAY WATERS  I work for an academic press as a humanities
editor, and I write. But my latest book, Against Authoritarian Aesthetics
(2000), came out not in the United States, in English, but in China, in
putonghua (common language). That follows, doesn't it? I will tell you how I
came to publish my book in Chinese, but my main point is to inform you about
our great opportunity to foster connections with humanists in China.   My
fascination with China began at the point where a lot of my friends report
theirs ended -- Tiananmen Square. For many people in the United States, all
China now resolves itself into the terrible image of one young man trying to
block a tank on June 4, 1989. That is a true image, but it belies a more
complex truth. Images can stop us cold, but they can also prod us on. That's
what happened to me in the course of watching the events in Tiananmen
Square, when I saw a rough, lumpy statue that looked like Lady Liberty. I
needed to go there, I knew not why.  Relations between the United States and
China had been improving since President Nixon went to China, in 1972, but
the contacts were still predominantly business-driven, except for the
Chinese students who came here to study. Why would either the U.S. or the
Chinese government promote study in the humanities that would facilitate the
importing of strange ideas and art forms?  When I did get to the mainland,
for a conference in Nanjing in 1996, I was surprised by how welcome I felt.
The workshop was organized by the Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation for the
Progress of Humankind, a tiny Swiss-French foundation committed to building
bridges between peoples. In our age of the clash of civilizations, when
every identity group insists how incommensurable it is with all others, the
quixotic nature of that enterprise appealed to my utopian spirit. The
foundation sounded as if it didn't know that the Age of Reason was over.   I
take what some might think perverse pleasure in attending academic
conferences, especially workshops. Stuck together, our masks don't fall off,
but they do slip. At that meeting in Nanjing, there were senior professors
in Mao suits who gave long, boring lectures to remind us of their power to
do so. There were also brash, outspoken professors of a sort unimaginable by
Americans, who often expect the Chinese to have been regimented into rigid
uniformity.  Encounters in foreign countries can be complex. It's hard for
foreigners to figure out Americans. We act so friendly, but no one gets easy
admittance to the Forbidden City of an American's psyche. If you don't
believe me, ask Emily Dickinson or David Lynch. China is superficially even
more foreboding: Why can't these people ever just get to the point?  The key
thing the meeting in Nanjing gave me was guanxi, impressive connections, the
most priceless of commodities in China. Those included Yue Daiyun (a
professor of comparative literature at Peking University, which is known as
"Beida'') and Tang Yi Je (a professor of philosophy at Beida). Tang's
father, who had received a Ph.D. at Harvard in the 1920s and was later
president of Beida, had been an intimate of the Gang of Four. Yue is of such
excellent academic pedigree that she once had the chance to shake the hand
of Chairman Mao. She has written that "his skin glowed from some kind of
makeup," suggesting to me that Andy Warhol's portraits of Mao in many
vibrant colors are truer representations of the Great Helmsman than I
thought upon first seeing them.  At the workshop in 1996, I discovered that
Yue is dedicated to pulling together people around the world through
literature. She has been doing that for decades, and has paid a high price
for it. At the age of 27, she was declared a "rightist," forced to leave her
teaching job, wrenched from her husband and two of her children, and
compelled to move to the countryside to work on a farm. She was told to stop
breast-feeding her newborn son, since the milk of a rightist was poison. Her
crime: planning a literary magazine in eager conformity with Mao's decree to
"Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.''  Yue is now an icon of female heroism in the
Chinese academy. In 1998, she invited me to lecture at Beida, and then
proposed that I develop my lecture, which was about how literature had
affected us in the 20th century, into a book for a series that has brought
the work of Western scholars like Fredric Jameson -- for years an
indefatigable intermediary to China -- to thousands of Chinese readers. Why
not publish with her first? she asked. (My book has sold 3,615 copies in
putonghua; I am putting the finishing touches on the English-language
version.)  It seemed to me it would be dereliction of duty not to return to
China after the book appeared. In recent years, the social glue in
U.S.-Chinese relations has been dissolving. In China, however, although
paranoia is general, it does not dominate life. One thing does not obsess
most of the Chinese I have met, and that is the events in Tiananmen Square.
There's much more to Chinese reality than that one event, and it means
something very different to the Chinese than to American TV audiences.
Knowing little, we believe that the subsequent crackdown has been absolute;
but for the Chinese, the events marked the beginning of selective, but
rapid, liberalization. Total control from the top down is impossible. China
is simply a more disunified, more fragile country than any American would
guess. With massive development under way, the East is like our Wild West.
My first lecture at Nanjing University (Nanda), for the English department,
had to be moved from a room that could accommodate 40 to one that could
accommodate more than 100. My second lecture, for the university's Art
Center, had more than 400 in the audience. One of the things that struck me
was the increase in the number of people who spoke and understood English
since my previous trip. The audience even caught my jokes.  In Shanghai, on
the way to Beijing, I visited colleagues at the Shanghai Foreign Language
Education Press, the university press of Shanghai International Studies
University. Its head told me that the press has been making money hand over
fist publishing books for those learning English. And it was planning to
publish scholarly treatises in English because more and more higher
education in China has been taking place in English.   In Beijing, at
Tsinghua University and the Beijing Language and Culture University, the
students prodded me with questions. One young man asked, "Are the
deconstructive critics such as Derrida and de Man saying that Western
culture is exhausted?" He went on to say that the Chinese feel that they are
on the verge of great growth. Indeed, there's great intellectual ferment in
China right now. Behind its industrial revolution, there's an intellectual
revolution. Postmodernism is the intellectual cover for celebration of the
market untrammeled and of the necessity of China's being different from the
rest of the world. With shocking ease, Jean-François Lyotard has been
married to Samuel Huntington, with Friedrich von Hayek officiating. A great
debate has been taking place between the postmodernists, who celebrate the
market, and those whom they denounce as the "new left," who want to bridle
economic development and retain the better features of state-sponsored
social-welfare programs.  Some academics want to highlight differences
between the United States and China, but more want to make contact. At the
end of my last lecture, one member of the audience delivered a ritual
thank-you, a spontaneous poem in my honor: "Ode to Bamboo Shoots" Green,
fresh and tender bamboo shoots, Pointed, fearing nothing about the strong
resistance of earth and stone, After being repeatedly sharpened and
Toughened, it becomes strong, With endless vitality, it smiles at the sky.
It seemed to say, "We Chinese are a much older people than you Americans,
but we welcome your fresh energy. Come again, please."  In Beijing, I
visited Yue and Tang. "We in China have been very concerned about how
Western specialists on China, the Sinologists, look at us, but we need to
consider how the nonspecialist considers China," Yue said to me. We agreed
that China is too important to be left to the Sinologists, most of whom have
tried to explain China only to other specialists.  Politicians in both
countries seem, much of the time, to have been educated at the same academy
that teaches, "When you are in trouble at home, denounce foreigners.'' There
is much for humanists to do. But we Americans can do a lot of harm right
now, depending on the attitude we adopt toward China. The Chinese are eager
to interact, but they have been burned many times before when they trusted
outsiders. They still bear wounds from their historical encounters with the
British, the Japanese, the Russians. We need to approach the Chinese as our
equals, with concerns -- for example, How do you govern a multicultural
nation that is located on a vast piece of land? -- that are, at heart,
remarkably like our own.  Lindsay Waters is executive editor for the
humanities at Harvard University Press. His latest book, Against
Authoritarian Aesthetics: Towards a Politics of Experience, was published in
putonghua by Peking University Press in 2000.   http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 14, Page B5